Stewart Lane
Stewart Lane Music
Composer Performer Cultural Activist
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released 2010
Photography Caroline Harte
Notes
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Four songs about love
Love, being such a broadly interpreted word, covering many bases and loaded with implications, its declaration has fueled some of the greatest human dramas, from affairs of the heart to dveastating wars.
Because people use the word freely without giving a sense of how they mean it, confusion abounds. It can be used to signify Honour, depth of feeling, integrity. It can be used to signify need, fixation, dependency.
So here are four songs each with a different interpretation of the word 'love'.
The first, (Sails) explores the empowerment we associate with the feeling of being in love. Emboldened to do what we otherwise might not do. Flying in the face of convention if only for a moment. Impulse. Action. Risk. A rashness often equated with ‘madness’.
Amen Baby tells the same story twice, with a slight variation that leads to completely different outcomes; a ‘love’ that retires from the world, implodes and one that embraces it, devouring experience.
Contrasting opinions, beliefs, life-styles, fortunes, cultures, opportunities, collaborations and conflicts, Saturn Return looks for a point of connectivity that simply is our humanness. The conditions under which we thrive, common to us all regardless of culture, race or gender. How do we find it in ourselves so it reflects back to us from our cultures?
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Were all individuals able to gain and maintain this internal sense of self and balance – would the role of the state transform from a system of governance to one of service to facilitate and enable?
We are surrounded by the examples of those who live life fully and meaningfully in the present. They are our master teachers and we have access to them and their example every day; animals. Untrammeled by the need to be anything other than themselves, or the need for need – they are spontaneous, live in the present, unburdened by the past.
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The last song on the EP (Crow) is a celebration of these beautiful creatures, their amazing capacity to be fully alive, to be joy, to be now, to be love . It also explores the question of why human beings have such difficulty in achieving it for themselves.